Event

There will be a one day crash course on all things “big data” at the upcoming San Francisco Predictive Analytics World conference on Monday, March 30th, 2015. Get the Big Data big picture with a day of introduction to the major concepts, methods, challenges, and best practices related to leveraging large volumes of information.

There will be a session on social media network analysis using NodeXL at the conference as well.

Networks are collections of connections — they are everywhere once you start to look. Learn how to collect, analyze, visualize, and publish insights into connected populations. Using the free and open NodeXL addin for Excel, anyone who can make a pie chart can now make a network chart. Create insights into social media, collaboration, organizations, markets, and other connected structures with just a few clicks. Easily publish reports with visualizations and content analysis. Apply social network analysis to your own brands, email, discussions or web sites.

Social media matters – it matters to consumers – and that social chatter can matter to you if you understood how to interpret it. Learn to identify your key social media influencers and use that information to amplify your brand’s message. Uncover connections between sales and social media data, empower marketing to uncover new dining trends and brand champions, and even impact loss prevention efforts. This session will teach you how to apply social media network maps to your brand (and competitor’s). Restaurant executives, in particular those with a technology mind-set, will find great value in learning how to build, interpret and use social network maps. Participants will have an opportunity to map their own brand on social media using the free and open NodeXL (http://nodexl.codeplex.com) tool.

Bring a Windows laptop running a recent copy of Office to participate in the exercises!

This is an example NodeXL social media network map and report for the hashtags #MURTEC, #HotelTechForum, #RestES or htmagazine:

Maps and reports like these reveal the structure of an online conversation, revealing the key people, groups, and topics.

I am delighted to return to South Africa where I will participate in the Mammoth BI conference in Cape Town, on November 17-18, 2014 at the Cape Town International Conference Centre, Convention Square, 1 Lower Long Street, Cape Town, 8001, Western Cape, South Africa.

The theme of the event is “How to Feed Consumers with a #Digital @ppetite”

I will speak about the ways that restaurants and dining experiences are discussed in social media. I will show network maps that visualize the relationships among people who talk about restaurants created with the free and open NodeXL social media network analysis and visualization application.

Here are some recent NodeXL social media network maps for mentions of major chain restaurants featured in the NodeXL Graph Gallery:DunkinDonuts

McDonalds

Chipotle

@olivegarden

These maps illustrate the shape of the crowd that gathers around the names of major chain restaurants. A few Twitter user accounts occupy key positions in these network crowds, these are the influential voices that are repeated widely by others.

Closer inspection (click through for details) reveals smaller groups or clusters which form as a smaller set of people interact with one another more than with the larger population. These groups have distinct topics of interest which are summarized in the content report associated with each visualization.

The network and content report can reveal the topics of interest to various groups in the discussion as well as the key people within each group.

The SBP conference provides a forum for researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government agencies to exchange ideas on current challenges in social computing, behavioral modeling and prediction, and on state-of-the-art methods and best practices being adopted to tackle these challenges. Interactive events at the conference are designed to promote cross-disciplinary contact.

Social Computing harnesses the power of computational methods to study social behavior within a social context. Behavioral Cultural modeling refers to representing behavior and culture in the abstract, and is a convenient and powerful way to conduct virtual experiments and scenario analysis. Both social computing and behavioral cultural modeling are techniques designed to achieve a better understanding of complex behaviors, patterns, and associated outcomes of interest. Moreover, these approaches are inherently interdisciplinary; subsystems and system components exist at multiple levels of analysis (i.e., “cells to societies”) and across multiple disciplines, from engineering and the computational sciences to the social and health sciences.

This April 8 and 9, 2013 an NSF funded workshop called Kredible.Net to be held at Purdue University will bring together researchers studying reputation and social roles in social media.

The grant will help researchers investigate how social media, especially Wikipedia articles and editors, shape public knowledge. The project aims to build a research community and to propose a research agenda for the study of reputation and authority in informal knowledge markets, such as Wikipedia.

Crowds of people gather in social media around many products, services, businesses, and events but they can be difficult to see and understand. With new free and open tools, it is now possible to map and measure social media spaces, capturing the sub-groups and key people within and between them. Learn how to capture social media data and quickly generate a visual map of the crowd. With maps in hand, we will discuss ways they guide a journey to the key influencers and concepts in the crowd.

My talk this year will focus on collecting and analyzing connections between digital objects (like users) and the insights these tools make possible.

Abstract: While digital content is archived in various ways, the “arcs” or links among people and their digital objects are not systematically saved. Efforts to store social media often overlooks including data about collections of connections. The Social Media Research Foundation is dedicated to open tools, open data, and open scholarship related to social media. It is producing tools that can collect, analyze and upload social media data, including the arcs that link people and objects. Using the free and open NodeXL application, users can collect, analyze and visualize complex networks and then upload the data to a growing archive on the web at NodeXLGraphGallery.org. As the group of researchers grows, an archive is being assembled to provide researchers around the world with the data about social media needed to understand the ways computer mediated communication tools shape society.